[EDITOR’S NOTE: Open Referral’s new standing technical committee wants to hear from members of our community about your priorities and feedback. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey– your input can help us shape our roadmap for the year ahead!]
As the Open Referral Initiative grows – including new and evolving international networks – our Human Service Data Specifications must evolve to address new needs, and our governance processes ought to evolve in tandem, to ensure that we continue to accountably and equitably address the diverse needs of our community.
Over the course of 2024, we’ve formed a standing committee to manage the development of HSDS and to advise on the technical stewardship of the emerging ecosystem of tools and applications that support adoption and use of HSDS in the global domain of human service directory informatics.
This Technical Committee will oversee the development of our core resource data exchange specifications and the associated tools that are essential to the adoption and use of these specifications. This involves analyzing and prioritizing prospective changes to HSDS, and guiding our technical stewards in the management of our shared backlog of issues for further discussion. Technical Committee members will attend regular meetings co-facilitated by Open Referral’s Lead Organizer and Technical Steward. By default, these meetings will also be open to observation by any member of our community (though the Committee has the power to convene closed meetings to discuss sensitive issues as needed). Committee members will also play an active role in discussion on the Open Referral Forums and HSDS Github repositories.
The Committee also can advise Open Referral’s Lead Organizer on issues related to the Open Referral community at large, and can make recommendations as to the investments of time and resources that ought to be prioritized for development of tools and other tech that can support adoption and use of HSDS. These details and more are established in the Committee’s charter, which you can review here.
The Committee has worked with Open Data Services Cooperative to develop a formal process by which changes to HSDS can be proposed, reviewed and revised, subjected to approval by Committee, submitted for comment to the community at large, and, if successful, codified by our technical stewards into updated specifications. See the now-official issue development process here.
(Note: we have already road-tested this process during the development of HSDS 3.1 – learn more about that upgrade in this announcement.)
The Committee consists of people with a track record of contributing input to the HSDS development process, and who are committed to upholding Open Referral’s mission, values, and principles. The members of the Committee are: Devin Balkind, of Sarapis; Kate Lambacher, of CIOC; Sarah Pottelberg, of Inform USA; Mike Thacker, of Porism + Placecube and the Open Referral UK network; and Skyler Young, of Connect211. We’re very grateful for the participation of each of these community leaders.
We currently have two open seats on the Committee. If you’re interested in serving, or have the name of someone in mind who would make a good fit, please reach out!
On a final note: you can help us set the direction of our work moving forward. The Technical Committee has expressed a strong interest in receiving feedback from the Open Referral community at large. Toward that end, the Committee has developed a survey to gather input from members of our network. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey, and give us feedback that can help us improve this process and our specifications!
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